Informatica achieved the highest score for current offering and strategy based on the evaluation of PowerCenter, a key component of the Informatica Platform. According to Forrester Research, Inc., “Informatica offers the most comprehensive ETL solution to support any requirement. Informatica continues to be one of the most dominant vendors in the ETL market. It has strong scalability, deployment options, security, transformation techniques, collaboration, and monitoring. In addition, Informatica’s strong vision and strategy help maintain its powerful and well-respected data integration brand. Informatica v9 has advanced capabilities for data quality, profiling, and lineage; a model-driven approach to provisioning data services; performance enhancements; cloud integration; common metadata; and role-specific tools. Today, more than 4,500 companies worldwide use Informatica for their information management initiatives ranging from ETL to data virtualization, test data management, data quality, and master data management, among others.”

According to Forrester, “data movement is critical in any organization to support data management initiatives, such as data warehousing (DW), business intelligence (BI), application migrations and upgrades, master data management (MDM), and other initiatives that focus on data integration. Besides moving data, ETL supports complex transformations like cleansing, reformatting, aggregating, and converting very large volumes of data from many sources.”

Forrester also notes that, “the enterprise ETL market continues to grow at a healthy pace as more enterprises replace manual scripts with packaged ETL solutions. This migration away from black-box custom code and toward ETL tools is driven by the need to support growing and increasingly complex data management requirements, provide greater developer agility through object reuse, and increase the transparency into and auditability of the code to improve troubleshooting and reduce compliance risk.”

The report also noted the move to support new and emerging technologies and initiatives, such as Hadoop, NoSQL, the cloud, social media and data services.

Informatica notes that the world is undergoing a major shift as the “where”, the “what” and the “why” of computing changes. This is having a profound effect on all aspects of computing with a shift from on-premise to the cloud (the "where"), from transaction data to interaction data (the "what") and from desktop to mobile (the "how"). Each of these shifts is contributing to a “big data” challenge—the need to manage vast amounts of data cost effectively while increasing its value through better decision making. Informatica solutions are uniquely designed to ensure that as the volumes grow organizations are well positioned to turn it into useable strategic assets no matter the volumes, complexity, diversity or velocity.

Forrester evaluated each vendor’s Current Offering against 26 criteria that focus on core and advanced functionality including runtime capability, integration options, tool environments, support and training, additional data integration techniques, and information management. In addition, Forrester also scored each vendor’s Strategy by assessing 20 criteria including product strategy, corporate strategy, go-to-market pricing strategy, and partnerships to expand market reach, with a significant focus on how well each vendor is addressing its current customers’ needs. Informatica received the highest scores across both axes.

“In today’s environment of rapid business and technology change, it is even more critical to have a common data integration platform that delivers mission critical performance, provides greater business agility, and maximizes return on data,” said Sachin Chawla, senior vice president and general manager, Data Integration, Informatica. “We are proud to have been recognized by Forrester as a leader in ETL which we believe speaks not only to the current success of thousands of customers worldwide, but our thought leadership in enabling companies to leverage new opportunities including social, mobile, cloud and big data today.”

Note: Informatica and Informatica Platform are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.